42 THE WEEK • JULY 29, 2018
PMO BEAT
R. PRASANNAN[email protected]N
. Gopalaswami is not only a believer in
astrology, but also a practitioner of it. Don’t
know if he ever used his soothsayer skills for
divining the results of the polls which he oversaw as
India’s election boss.
He learnt the ‘science’ of jyotish from a south
Delhi academy, while serving as home secretary. He
already had a master’s in chemistry. Not sure which
of these qualifi ed him to head a panel of dons tasked
with spotting 10 institutions that could be groomed
to Ivy League glory. Gopalaswami and the dons have
performed an act that satvik jyotishis are loathe to do.
Th ey have made the birthchart of an unborn child.
Th ey have declared the Jio Institute, which the Amban-
is are yet to father, as an institution of eminence. When
trolled, they said it has the ‘potential’
to be eminent.
Hail the creation of a garbha
shrimant, or damn the move as a case
of pre-natal merit determination, but
Arvind Panagaria, who vice-headed
the NITI Ayog, has dubbed Modi
a “courageous leader” for this act
of eugenics. Any PM “would think
twice or thrice” before announcing
something like this, says Panagaria.
He means it as a compliment!
Successive PMs have been pretty
peeved that India that is Bharat,
which once hosted Taxila and
Nalanda, doesn’t have a world class
university today. Manmohan Singh, who had enough
degrees to give a complex to every PM till the end of
this century, worried about this day in and day out.
So, in 2005, his fi nance minister P. Chidambaram
promised to “make a beginning with one institution”,
and gave 0 100 crore to IISc to try and get “ranked
alongside Oxford and Cambridge or Harvard and
Stanford.” Th e next year, PC put his pennies and paise
in the three grandmother institutions—the universities
of Calcutta, Madras and Mumbai which had turned
150—and another Rs 100 crore in the Punjab Agricul-
tural University.
Th us it went on every year—G.B. Pant, Tamil Nadu
and Mahatma Phule farm universities, Mysore, Delhi,
Aligarh Muslim and Banaras Hindu and several more.
But excellence eluded them like the Holy Grail.
Th e Modi regime found that this naming-and-fam-
ing wasn’t getting them anywhere. So, Finance Min-
ister Arun Jaitley divided the kitty into small bundles
and began funding all and sundry, and the mandarins
began coining acronyms. Th us they created 36 centres
of excellence under the scheme training and research
in frontier areas of science & technology (FAST), 30
centres of excellence under technical education quali-
ty improvement programme (TEQIP), one research
park, 15 universities with potential for excellence
(UPE), 21 centres with potential for excellence in par-
ticular areas (CPEPA), 172 colleges with potential for
excellence (CPE), and 14 colleges
of excellence (CE).
By last year, they got tired of
acronyms, dumped excellence,
and began a hunt for eminence,
semantically a nobler goal. Th ey
tasked Gopalaswami and Co to
name 10 public and 10 private
institutes which could achieve
eminence.
From among 144 applicants, the
team found only IISc, IIT Bombay
and IIT Delhi (no one would quar-
rel) in the public sector, BITS Pilani
and Manipal Academy (no quarrel
again) in the private sector, and Jio
in the unborn sector (all quarrel).
Gopalaswami says, Jio has been selected because
the Ambanis have promised to do well in the college.
By the same logic, would Jio be giving grades and
degrees on the basis of what its students promise?
Gentlemen, the sacred mantra that ought to reso-
nate in the groves of academe is: perform or perish.
Not promise or perish.
Indeed, Shakespeare wrote, “Some are born great;
some achieve greatness, and some have greatness
thrust upon ‘em.” But the Bard put the words in the
mouth of Malvolio, a self-obsessed clown in
Twelfth Night.A school for scandal and eminence
ILLUSTRATION BHASKARAN